First Sunday of Advent

“Why do you let us wander, O Lord, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?” This passage from our first reading today begins to capture the signs of the times many in our community and world are feeling. In the midst of great suffering from war and violence, on scales beyond any one person’s understanding, it’s easy to respond to this absurdity with despair.

How can human life have meaning when it is so callously treated and thrown away? Today’s message from the Scriptures offers another answer to dealing with grief and suffering. We are not meant to understand the evil that occurs in this world, but what we do know and can put our faith and trust in, is that we have a God who is there for us. Our God lived, suffered, and died just as we do, and Jesus did so for us. We know that our God is always there for us, calling to us, and all we have to do is turn to Him. This trust in the peace and love of our God is at times all that we have. Afterall, that is what grace is--the desperately needed and freely given underserved love of God to partake in God’s reality. 

On this first Sunday of Advent, we enter into a period of newness and preparation in the Church. Around us, the days are short and the night is long. Our time is overfilled and sometimes the weight of what we carry feels too burdensome to bear. St. John of the Cross offers an apt example during these long nights in his 16th century reflection, Dark Night of the Soul. In documenting his journey of contemplation, he recorded great valleys of spiritual desolation marked by the hallmarks of pain and grief. Perhaps we are now in a dark night ourselves when facing harrowing loss of life on a global scale and tragedy in personal lives. We struggle to make sense of it and see our way forward. In this dark night, it may seem impossible to see, but even in that seemingly hopeless situation, God has never been so close to us. All we have in such moments is to turn to a God who loves and cares for us. We must be ready to turn to God no matter the hour, for we know not the hour when this dark night will come.